A blog about video games and not much else. Updates at intervals of time.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Earthbound Review

Have you ever played a
game that frustrated you to no end? A game where there are dozens of enemies
but they’re mostly identical? A game where irritating status ailments are
plentiful and what little enjoyment you get out of the combat is sucked dry by
the persistent hassle? A game where you enjoy yourself more using a walkthrough
because every single step is littered with obtuse bullshit triggers, so that
you can only proceed when you think of things in the way the game designers
did, as opposed to rationally in-universe? A game where, when you get down to
it, everything is a broken mess that’s “old-school” in all the wrong ways?
There’s a game like that...and it’s called Earthbound.

Have you ever played a
game that defied your expectations? A game where, for better or worse, you can
never really predict what’s going to happen next? A game where it’s in some
strange middle-ground between absurdist parody and innocent, heartfelt
story-telling? A game where there are strange but oddly compelling visuals and
sounds, where you want to keep playing just to see where it’ll take you next? A
game that can make you laugh, creep you out, and above all has an unusual
earnestness to it that embodies the phrase ‘weird but wonderful’? There’s a game
like that....and it’s called Earthbound.

By now it should be clear
I have mixed feelings on Earthbound. There were a lot of things it did that
drove me, as a game design enthusiast, up the wall. I grumbled my way through
many portions; and I did indeed look up a walkthrough several times until I
finally just gave up and went through the latter half of the game with it
constantly open in another window in case I needed it. But the fact of the
matter is I kept coming back. Now this is no special thing in and of itself, as
I come back to a lot of games that really don’t deserve it. For example, I
really should finish that Neopets article someday just so you can see the
depths I’ll go to for a shitty RPG. But Earthbound is better than that makes it
out to be, and every time I laughed at the game or heard some of its lovely
music, I knew that I kept going because I wanted
to, not out of morbid curiosity.

But I’m getting ahead of
myself. We can talk about why Earthbound is shitty and why Earthbound is awesome
but first we need to mention what Earthbound is. Earthbound is an RPG for the Super Nintendo that came out in
1994 in Japan and 1995 elsewhere. It’s actually named Mother 2 in Japan, part of a whole series of games. However, Mother 1 (which is generally regarded
as just okay) and Mother 3 (which is
generally regarded as fantastic) are both games that have never seen an
official release outside Japan (must to the discontent of Mother 3 fans). You
may recognize the series from Earthbound’s main character Ness, who is a
recurring fighter in every Super Smash
Bros. game (as well as Lucas, the protagonist of Mother 3, who appeared in
Super Smash Bros. Brawl).

Due to its international
release and generally agreed quality, Earthbound is probably the most popular
game of the series, and a year or so ago it received a re-release on the Wii U
Virtual Console. I bought it just a few months after it came out, but regular
readers probably recognize by this point my typical procrastination habits,
which led to me not finishing the game until just a few weeks ago. Earthbound
is a strange game, one that’s known
for its strangeness in fact. The game is actually quite enjoyable in some ways,
to the point where I could recommend it to people. But before we talk about
what makes the game good, we’re going
to have to get out of the way what makes the game bad. And unfortunately, there’s a decent amount to work with
there...

This Combat Stinks!

Here we see the combat
system in its natural habitat. Yes, some of the first enemies you beat up are
indeed stray dogs.

Earthbound is in many
ways a very traditional JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game). You have battles on
a separate screen from walking around, in the view where you can only see your
opponents and random trippy (there really is no other way to describe them)
backgrounds behind them. You take it in turns to select actions, either hitting
your opponents, defending, using items or using your psychic powers for various
effects. If you’re not a fan of this type of combat in general, I don’t see
this game changing your mind. Even if you are though...

A lot of the problems I
have with Earthbound’s combat are rooted in old-school JRPG problems. Enemies
die quickly but often times, so do you. Random chance is a consistent factor.
Let’s say we can ignore the critical hits that often arbitrarily decide combat
in this world of glass combatants who die so easily. Even then, normal attacks have
a significant variance in how much damage they can do, making it hard to
predict things with regularity. On top of this, the enemies are all strange and
random, from aliens to sentient gas station pumps to possessed teacups and
more. This fits with the strangeness of the game, but it makes determining what
enemies do without foreknowledge more or less impossible. How was I supposed to
know that the sentient tree would explode upon death, dealing massive damage to
my entire party? That’s not a joke, that’s an actual enemy and its effect.

Don’t you ever
question me again.

Your psychic abilities occasionally
mix things up a bit, but they’re mostly pretty standard. There are moves that
deal lots of damage, or damage to multiple opponents. There are healing moves
that restore life or remove status ailments. And there are utility moves that
do things like giving temporary shields and buffs to party members. Though they
add some depth, they aren’t all that original when you get down to it. And you
won’t even use them most of the time, since this is a game where saving your
resources is crucial. You’ll want to save your psychic powers for healing in
between battles or blowing through a boss fight; so most of the time the combat
simply consists of you attacking over and over. Throw in irritating status
ailments (hey, ever wanted your combat skills crippled, your movement controls
randomized and the only cure to be all the way back in town? You’re in luck!)
and I generally preferred to just avoid combat altogether.

This isn’t to say the
combat is completely without merit. In a relatively progressive move for the
time, enemies exist outside of battle screens, so you can actively run past
them, and you or your enemy approaching from the behind gives them a turn of
preemptive strike. You even automatically kill enemies when you’re way too
strong for them, cutting out hassle revisiting areas.

Another interesting quirk
of the combat system that I’ve actually never seen elsewhere is the counter
system. You see, your health and psi points are on little counters that roll by
when they decrease. But it takes a while for the counters to move, particularly
at higher levels, and you don’t actually die until your health hits zero. So
you can have party members die and save them on your next turn before it
actually happens, which is pretty neat. And simple though it may be the combat
can occasionally present some mildly interesting strategy and resource
management with your psychic powers and items. It’s just not near good enough
in my eyes to carry the game, which is a shame.

PSI Confusion

What’s also a shame about
Earthbound are the constant tiny irritations that poke and prod you as you try
and progress outside of combat. First off, there’s the inventory system. Old
RPGs had a habit of giving you a limited amount of things to carry, because for
some reason in lands of super-powered children fighting mythical beats and
demigods the realism of limited packing space is something we want to hold
onto. In all seriousness, I can see some advantages of limited inventory
besides blindly holding onto tradition. But Earthbound is without a doubt the worst inventory system I can recall
seeing in all the dozens of games I’ve played that had such systems.

So imagine your character
only has room in their bag for 20 items. Now imagine that your character has to
keep all their key items - keys and maps and knick-knacks necessary to progress
- in that same bag. Now imagine that for some god damn reason, the 4 pieces of
equipment/clothing that you are currently
wearing also take up 4 of those 20 slots. As you may have guessed, I’m asking
you to imagine these things because they are all actually true, and it is a source of constant irritation.

You can also carry a
bicycle inside your pack, which becomes bigger than you when you use it. This
is something I’d accept in other games, but the limited space makes it sting
all the more.

Now, there are some things
that mitigate this. Every character has their own inventory, so that adds
another 20 slots for each of the (eventual) 3 extra party members...well, 16
after you count their equipment. But it’s a significant number of hours into
the game before you even get one
additional party member. Not only that, but the amount of key items you can
carry quickly gets overwhelming. I reached a point relatively early on where my
inventory was entirely filled with my
equipment and key items. Now, there’s a storage service you can use (at a cost
of time and/or money of course) to get rid of some of these items. But you’ll
never know when you’ll need them! The game doesn’t tell you when you’ll need
key items, many of which are strange and innocuous. Sometimes, the game doesn’t
even get rid of key items you’ll never use again once you’ve used them! So
you’ll be lugging around some items of no actual use whatsoever unless you
check the internet to see what gets used when.

The strangeness of the
key items ties into another problem the game has: having no idea how to
progress. Earthbound is, as I’ve mentioned many times before, very strange.
This has the unintended side effect of giving it the same problem many old
adventure games were known for. The key to moving forward in the story often
involves you doing strange and comedic things, like using fly paper to trap
zombies or having hallucinogenic visons from magical cake baked by a discontent
wife. How are you supposed to predict such odd turns of events? Well...you
aren’t! Though the game sometimes throws hints of how to proceed at you,
sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes they’re frustratingly vague.

Well okay, this one
isn’t vague; it’s just weird and annoying.

There are two ways to
deal with this. The first is to constantly wander around lost, exploring every
nook and cranny and talking to everyone you see in the hopes that it will
trigger some event that moves the story forward, after which, if what to do
next isn’t clear, you do that whole business over again. The second way to deal
with this is to throw up your hands and look up a walkthrough on the internet,
which is the option that eventually became my default. So that’s terrible, the
inventory is terrible, and the combat leaves a lot to be desired. But now that
I’ve vomited streams of complaints like I was Master Belch, a hideous pile of
slime that is actually-one-of-the-games-villains-no-I-am-not-kidding...I think
it’s time for a change of pace. Accepting all
of that, why is Earthbound a good
game? Luckily, there’s a lot to cover here too...

This isn’t one of
those good things, but I felt like showing it before we moved on.

Weird and Wonderful

Earthbound opens with you
finding a meteor crashed near your house, and a talking fly named Buzz Buzz
appearing and telling you that you’re the chosen one. The fly soon dies and
isn’t ever mentioned again because he wasn’t really important. You then begin a
vast adventure across several continents and possibly dimensions, where you visit strange landmarks, recruit other
psychic children, and generally find yourself in odd situations. The game isn’t
always completely absurd, which is probably the best because it would probably
be too much to handle if it weren’t somewhat grounded. But it’s never too long
before you’re reminded of the game you’re playing. And that game is simply different, intentionally weird in ways
I’ve never really seen before.

My teen years were
already past when I played this game, so I’m unaware what the exact consequences
of my foolishness will be.

The game takes place in a
modern day setting (always a nice change of pace), but one that’s slightly off,
as if the world were created by someone with an unusual sense of humor.
(Spoiler alert: It was). Healing items are everyday foods like hamburgers,
supplemented by condiments like salt or ketchup for boosted effects. You store
your money in ATMs and call your dad to save your game and check up on your
experience points. Talking to random people often yields expectantly random
results, non-sequitur musings off the top of people’s heads that has no bearing
whatsoever on what you’re doing. The fourth wall is occasionally broken, though
intermittently so you never really expect it. You’re never quite sure of what
the aliens you’re fighting want or even what they are, apart from the fact that they’re often rather creepy.

At this point, I think
it’d be better for me to just let the images stand on their own.

If you notice a lack of
outright jokes in this review, it’s only partially
because I’m an unfunny hack. It’s also because there’s no need to make fun of
what’s already ridiculous, and Earthbound has ridiculousness in spades. Though
the general outline of the game was made clear from the start, I genuinely
never knew what to expect next from Earthbound, what wacky little vignette the
game would throw at me on my next step towards its inevitable conclusion. This
above most things was what kept me playing, kept me involved. Sometimes the
game would take a creepy turn, often times it would take a more humorous one,
and sometimes it was just plain weird.
But despite its strangeness, it was often unexpectedly...earnest. I’ll get to what I mean by that and wrap things up, but
first allow me a quick interlude for...

Moody Melodies and
Stones of Sound

Anyone who knows me knows
that I can’t let a game pass by without commenting on its music. The gameplay
and writing I always mention, and the visuals are apparent to anyone who looks
at them, but the music can really give you a feel for a game, and enhance
what’s already there. And the music of Earthbound is definitely a part of why I
liked Earthbound. The songs vary wildly depending on the occasion. Sometimes
the music was more of background ambience, often creepy sliding synths that
sound strange and otherworldly. Sometimes the game seemed to take some cues
from blues, jazz, or early rock and roll, with catchy off-beat tunes heavy on
bass and horns. Other times it could be solemn and soft, dripping slow echoing
beats into an ocean of silence. Whatever it was though, it made good use of a
unique combination of sounds to be varied, but still sounds like...Earthbound. My
musical vocabulary has never been perfect, and it’s even more difficult to use
it to describe something as distinctive and varied as this soundtrack, so let’s
get to some examples.

There are more worthwhile
pieces of music in Earthbound than I can name here, but a good place to start
is at the beginning. This music plays when you give the game your name, your 4
characters names, your dogs name, your favorite thing and your favorite food.
It’s percussive and punchy, with a strong bass line and upbeat tone, like much
of the games music. But it also has a stranger, potentially creepy side with
its shuffled static-y samples of random people talking at the start. This
actually turns out to represent the games soundtrack pretty well, in addition
to being admirably catchy.

Onett is your hometown,
and has a fittingly cheery musical beginning. It’s innocent happy music for
walking about the town, and doesn’t need to be much more than that. I also
particularly enjoy the sunrise introduction that plays the first time you hear
this song. It’s happy and anticipatory, but also fits in a bit of the strange
sounds that will accompany your adventure to come.

For a taste of what the
battle music is like in the game, here’s Battle Against a Weird Opponent. In
general, I don’t enjoy the in-combat or ambient music in Earthbound as much as
the rest of it. However, the battle tunes, strange and occasionally weirdly
structured though they are, can often have an underlying beat you can
appreciate.

Snowman is the theme that
plays when you first encounter your third party member, who gets his own
perspective shift for a while. Apart from the obvious connection to his
homeland of Winters, it’s a softer and slower song than some of the cheery
themes I’ve presented to you before. Nonetheless, it’s good stuff.

I think I may have a
slight preference for string music as opposed to band and horn-heavy music. The
city of Fourside definitely shows
that I’ll make exceptions if the music is good enough. Starting with an opening
build-up as you cross the bridge into the game’s biggest city, the song is
aptly majestic. The slow, deliberate yet flowing horns embody a grandeur not
found in other places. It’s also catchy as hell, and I can listen to it on loop
for quite some time.

Bazaar is a theme to a
late-game desert town that isn’t particularly notable. However, I like the
music and am really pushing the amount of songs I can comfortably embed in this
article because I have gone mad with power.

The main plot of the game
has you visiting strange landmarks adding segments of music to your sound
stone. This eventually results in Eight Melodies, the main theme of the game.
The version I prefer is the one here, which appears in a flashback when you
finally assemble the full set. It has a slow build-up from its most basic,
music box style form to a more complete version. I love this song. It is, I
feel, emblematic of some of the best parts of Earthbound: the strange but oddly
sincere. I also get this feeling from...

Home Sweet Home is the
song that plays when you return home, and before I completed the sound stone I
thought of it as the de facto main theme of the game. Like everything in
Earthbound, it keeps a certain strange, otherworldly sound to it. The tinkling
guitar, the strange synths, and the ebb and flow from loud to soft...it is,
above all else, a wonderful piece of
music. For lack of a better word, it really is just...heartfelt.

Super Smash Bros Melee’s
song representing Mother 2 was a heavily remixed version of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjhRBuJia-k.
It’s a pace and feel more suited to a fighting game, but it lets me know that
I’m not the only one that really likes this music. And these last two songs
lead up to one last point I want to make about the game Earthbound.

Home Sweet Home

You may have noticed that
here and there I keep mentioning Earthbound is earnest, and you might not know what I mean by that. The thing
about Earthbound is...it’s often quite funny. I enjoyed its strange sense of
humor and its weird antics, but I don’t think I would have appreciated the game
quite as much as I did if that was all
it had. Aside from the absurd events, the occasional creepy undertones, and the
constant comedy, Earthbound comes down to a story about kids going on an
adventure. It’s not a perfectly written story. Some sections of the game are
duller than others, there aren’t many interesting twists and turns in the
overarching plot, and the main characters are unfortunately mostly bland and
one-dimensional, each getting like up to a dozen lines in the whole game. But
rarely mentioned beyond all this is what feels like an innocent joy to the proceedings.

It’s hard to
describe...but perhaps this will help: Your main character Ness is usually
quite strong. But sometimes, long, somewhat random periods apart, he will be
struck with a status called homesick. He’ll perform worse in battle, sometimes
stopping to think about home instead of fighting. The only way to cure this
status is to either visit home or call your mom. If you call her, she won’t say
anything special, just give you small talk about what she’s been doing and
occasionally cheer you on. Likewise, going home doesn’t cause some charismatic
speech about believing in yourself, or anything like that. Your mother just
makes you a plate of your favorite food and you sleep in your own bed. But even
though it doesn’t do too much in terms of story or gameplay, this feature says
something about the game, and the feeling of it as a whole.

Earthbound is a game with
many flaws, and I can’t pretend those flaws aren’t there. The fact of the
matter is the persistent annoyances of the games mechanics and structure will
probably keep some people from enjoying it. Even the good parts of the game aren’t
exactly perfect. But even if the game isn’t perfect, I can say with a shadow of
a doubt that it’s unique. There is no
game I have ever played that was quite like Earthbound. It’s strange, it’s
funny, it’s interesting to experience. And past that strangeness, when you’re
not distracted by fighting hippies with rulers or purchasing bags of poisonous
snakes, there’s a sincerity to find there. The characters in this game aren’t
wizards or princes; they’re kids from the suburbs. They don’t make grandiose speeches
about truth and justice; they’re weird and socially awkward. And the moral
center of this game isn’t some big idealistic stand; it’s just the innocent
appreciation of loving family and friends. So if you happen to see what I do in
Earthbound, you’ll enjoy the game. You’ll enjoy it because it’s funny, because
it’s strange, and because it’s not quite like anything else. So for all its
flaws, in a basic, heartfelt way, Earthbound is simply...weird and wonderful.